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The open source R language has been in use by statisticians to do data analysis, predictive modeling and visualization for over a decade. This week, R is set to undergo a revolution of sorts with a revamped commercial effort.

The TIOBE index for 2009 says that Google's new Go programming language experienced more growth in popularity than any other language in 2009. The growth is quite remarkable given that the language became available late in the year. Is it all just hype?

Vala is a new programming language that aims to bring modern programming language features to GNOME developers without imposing any additional runtime requirements and without using a different ABI compared to applications and libraries written in C.

Google is just not getting enough. After its own browser and a Linux-based operating system, it's now coming up with its own programming language. Behind its development lurk some of the legends in UNIX history.

Just one week shy of Christmas 2008, the Python world saw the release of version 3 of Python. Big deal, eh? Well ... it turns out it was and is, as Python 3 is the first major release of Python designed from the get-go to be incompatible with prior versions of the language.

The software freedom community should minimize its use of programming language infrastructure that comes primarily from anti-software-freedom companies, notwithstanding FaiF (Free as in Freedom) implementations.

1801 - Joseph Marie Jacquard uses punch cards to instruct a loom to weave "hello, world" into a tapestry. Redditers of the time are not impressed due to the lack of tail call recursion, concurrency, or proper capitalization.

So what does python have to offer? It is a nice mix of procedural programming, object oriented and functional. That is what I love about it. It allows you to work in a mix of all three. It also seems that it is made by a bunch of people that understand that while flexibility is important (Perl code) you have to be able to READ and UNDERSTAND something written by another human being.

The past couple of years have seen an explosion of open source programming languages and utilities that are geared toward children. Many of these efforts are based around the idea that, since the days of BASIC, programming environments have become far too complex for untrained minds to wrap themselves around.

Perl's 21st anniversary of release is next Thursday, 18 December. Perl 5 is already 14 years old. Though the language has seen many changes since 1994, it can't stand still. Perl 5.10 added many wonderful features and Perl 6 will change the landscape for programming languages, but what's the vision for Perl 5? How can the language stay relevant?

Version 6 of the popular Perl programming language will not be compatible with previous versions, but will open up a new world of custom “languages” and interpreters, according to its founder Larry Wall.

This week Python 3.0 was released, and it represents one of those rare instances: Python 3.0 was designed to clear up a lot of now-inertial legacy issues with the Python language and figure out good ways to do things now instead of unquestioningly sticking with what seemed like good ways (or, more often, the least painful ways) to do things five or ten years ago.